Can't people just play video games, without sending death threats or console warring or all of the other weird nonsense?

For the sake of the people in this poll I would hope that what this person is saying, who said Xbox games were coming to other platforms back in December, is incorrect.

We do have to ask ourselves why 116 days after the Activision deal is complete we still see none of their titles on Gamepass. Bethesda's were added within a couple of days. We might get some idea next week, perhaps along with the back catalog of activision titles finally coming.

Doc_Darks video was amazing, shit was legit hilarious 😂😂

I agree with this take, spending money on the same level as a huge budget film as we have seen with Spiderman 2 cannot be sustained.  A miss which can happen can be devastating and a few misses would be catastrophic.  You only have to look at Suicide Squad to see that a miss which this game is going to be will probably have a big ripple effect for the studio.  I am sure that game cost a lot of money and while reviews seem to be average at best, average reviews do not sell big budget games. 

The cost of producing games is getting really expensive but its gamers expectations that is setting this margin especially in the console space.  I believe gamers on the PC are way more receptive to average if not even so so graphical games where they sell really good but on the console, you basically have to hit all the high points in order to get decent sales and even then might not break even.

Another case in point is Square.  After really snubbing the Xbox for a while, they are not putting in support.  Sales of the last Final Fantasy game did not hit the numbers they wanted and you know with a game like that it cost a pretty penny to make.  This really might be why MS strategy has changed because the numbers for just console isn't pulling in the weight compared to the investment.

A big part of ABK games not being added to GP had to do with the state of whether or not the deal was actually going to pass. Wasn't much point in doing the work porting if it was all going to be for not. With Bethesda, there was little to no pushback, so that was being worked on to be ready for when the deal closed. MS was definitely caught off guard to the level of backlash they got with purchasing ABK. 

Looking at Ryuu's post of the DF's poll, removing day 1 first party games from GP will be a huge deal breaker for most!

There is nothing to port, at least for gamepass console. The games are on Xbox already, adding them to gamepass will be a simple process and I don't buy the line that it isn't. It doesn't take 4 months to add games to gamepass. It will be a fairly simple process in the backend to change which titles are included with the subscription.

There is definitely some reason Activision titles aren't on their yet, and I don't believe it has anything to do with them questioning if the deal would go through or not. What that reason is I cannot speculate and it doesn't mean that they aren't going to come to gamepass, but there is some reason we do not know about.

Actually business wise, its best to not respond to rumors.  If you respond to rumors, then you suddenly do not, you give validation to when you respond and when you do not.  Its best to not respond at all.  If the rumor is incorrect and it never happens, people would stop believing in rumors but more important, you do not give any validation to any rumor as the industry is full of them.

Now MS might already had plans for an event to talk about their business plans and even if they did, it would still not be in their best interest to respond to rumors.

Also if you believe if MS got to a point where they had to make an official reply, you do want to prepare for it as best as you possible can as you read the general feedback on the rumors to form your reply.  Knee jerk reply's usually is the worse you can do and usually it does more damage than resolve anything.

IIRC SneakerSo was banned on ResetEra for being wrong on some "insider" stuff in the past, he is considered a bit unreliable by Era so I'll take what he says with a grain of salt, even if he was right in December on some stuff.

They always told us ABK Game Pass would take a while and in fairness they straight up gave us the reason, Bethesda actually prepared months before closure to be added into Game Pass (and even after closure, it took a few months to add the rest) while ABK did basically zero work on it beforehand because they were doubting the deal would go through, Lol.

Exactly.

Sony won the console race just like T-rex won the evolution race and then... Adapt or die.

Just look a this leak.

Spiderman 2

Expected budget 315m (I assume it includes marketing)
expected copy sold 10.5m (I think it is at 7m or so as of now)
Expected profits $75m 

Some of that $ 75m must be reinvested to support the subsidized hardware and then divided by the number of years the game was in dev to get an average/year.

Meanwhile, Sony shareholders can expect better ROI from their smaller movie division. 

With such a number, you see why it's simply impossible to just transit from gen to gen without supporting the last gen for a few years even at the expense of being criticized for holding back the next gen by consumers. Game sales are just cannibalized by the low number of installed next-gen early on shareholders must wait mid to end-gen before seeing a good ROI just to then be tasked to invest to architect the next next-gen.

This model made sense in the past when the dev cost was way lower and dev time way shorter but now it's just silly and MS is just exposing this fact IMO. And with that in mind, it's kinda funny. MS in the console wasn't treated fairly, they are the mega-corporation that tried to "take down" the established and loved player. So what do they do, shift the rules of the game, and act as the meteor that ended the very context in which T-Rex can be considered to have won the evolution game. IMO, MS is set to achieve numbers impossible to achieve in a console-focused exclusive business model and will make any shareholder in such a model question its validity.

This, for me, is the reason Jim Ryan left, not because he failed to stop the ABK transaction. but because this transaction being allowed just made the, anchor the status quo, strategy he was using predictably unsuccessful and even silly making PlayStation unprepared for the next context in which success will be measured. He knew instantly that whatever his strategy was set to benefit the shareholders it would never be enough to satisfy them when they'll see what MS would achieve.

Only thing I know is that no development can be done while the deal did not close.  Since I have been a part of a few mergers, I know that we could not integrate the other company products into our system until after the deal closed even though we knew exactly what was going to be done first.  We could not start anything until the deal was closed.  As to the technical side and license side, who knows what has to clear or what has to be done in order for it to happen.  Hell you do not even know if MS has the development/ business resources to do it in the time frame you believe it should happen.  We get a sense that MS is doing this because basically they have made some vague statements on that front but there could be multiple issues at hand but one I do know, nothing happened until after the sale was closed.